If you haven’t, check out the feature story by the John Locke Foundation’s Daren Bakst over on the homepage.

Planet Gore regular Navy Bob has checked it out, and has this to say:

Finally! Someone making the point that electricity from windmills and solar panels has nothing to do with energy independence and reducing oil imports — although it was buried at the bottom of the story. It should be the lead of every article about energy because the argument that solar and wind power will help us become energy independent is the main attraction that renewable energy holds for normal people who aren’t enviromaniacs, and it’s totally bogus. The author rightfully distinguishes between renewable electricity — which we don’t need since, as he notes, we’re already electricity-independent — and renewable transport fuels — such as ethanol, which is bogus for other reasons.
Although the author points out that oil is burned to produce only 1.5 percent of our electricity, he didn’t note that it’s oil left over from producing gasoline and diesel for vehicles. You can only get a certain amount of those critical transportation fuels from a barrel. What ’s left over is made into other products — very useful ones to be sure, such as the residual fuel oil occasionally burned in power plant boilers when it’s cheap enough. But they’re still leftovers. If that small percentage of oil burned for electricity were eliminated, we would still import the same amount of petroleum for our vehicles.